surprised to find, as she moved about, that she was trembling.

Her brother came back, and she turned to meet him. To her surprise he was standing inside the door, white to the lips and staring at her with wild eyes.

"Saunders!" he said chokingly, "Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it away."

He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.

"He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican," he managed to say. "Do you--do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile number. He said so."

He looked up at her, his face twitching. "They're hound dogs on a scent, Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open."

"You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years."

"I know." He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand. "Poor old Bev!" he said. "After the way you've come back, too. It's a damned shame."

She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent and a little hard.

"I'd better make sure that was Jud first," he offered, after a time, "and then warn him."

"Why?"

"Bassett will be after him."

"No!" she commanded sharply. "No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight. Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this Bassett is at home and in bed."

She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel. But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her window, looking out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned 

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